Stream your iTunes library to your iPhone and iPod touch

You don't necessarily have to pick and chose which media to bring on your …

Whether the size of your iTunes library outpaces your iPhone or iPod touch by a song or a mile, you've had to develop some kind of system for picking exactly which media you bring on the go. Sure, smart playlists can swap out a fresh collection of tunes and videos each time you sync, but what if you could stream your entire library and do away with having to chose altogether?

If you can hop on a WiFi hotspot either in the home or wandering elsewhere, the Embraceware Blog has a handy tip for those who just gotta have all their media at the touch of a finger. Setup isn't exactly a one-click operation, but after enabling Mac OS X's built-in Personal Web Sharing feature and performing some Terminal trickery, you'll be able to use MobileSafari and WiFi on your iPhone and iPod touch to browse your entire library and stream anything you want.

Of course, there are caveats to this trick. For starters, the library browsing UI obviously won't be as slick the iTunes implementation built into your WiFi-endowed Apple PMP (it's literally just a linked text list of all your media). Second, this should work well over the typical 802.11b/g/n network at home, but if you go the extra mile to try and stream over the web while you're out 'n about, you could experience reliability issues and throttling on behalf of the ISPs you're streaming through. Still, it's a good trick that isn't too hard to set up, and it might help ease the pain of a 4, 8 or even 16GB storage crunch until flash memory matures into the sizes we're all craving.